Endorsement Fever: This is good news?

Colin Powell and Ken Adelman have endorsed Obama, and that’s supposed to be reassuring? Normally I’d take an endorsement by one of those guys and run in the other direction.

Powell now apologizes for his 2002 speech to the UN claiming indisputable proof that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, but it was quite a doozy of a screw-up. His endorsement of the evidence helped delegitimize opposition to the war as a fringe, dangerous opinion. (“The evidence he presented to the United Nations—some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail—had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them,” the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen wrote at the time. “Only a fool—or, possibly, a Frenchman—could conclude otherwise.”)

In 2002 Adelman famously predicted “a cakewalk” victory in Iraq. He derided war critics as “chicken littles” for raising the possibility that things might not go as smoothly as he and his fellow-hawks had predicted.

McCain’s foreign policy crew has quite a few cranks (William Kristol, to state the most obvious) and his policies are generally scarier than Obama’s. Agreed. But having Powell and Adelman sign up with the Obama movement is about as uplifting as when Obama endorsed ballistic missile defense (the scaled down version of Star Wars) during the second debate. It’s conservatives who should be cheering.

“Eight months pregnant I told an old woman sitting beside me on the bus that the egg that hatched my baby came from my wife’s ovaries. I didn’t know how the old woman would take it; one can never know. She was delighted: That’s like a fairy tale!”

“Between 2007 and 2010, Albany’s poverty rate jumped 12 points, to a record high of 39.9 percent. More than two thirds of Albany’s 76,000 residents are black, and since 2010, their poverty rate has climbed even higher, to nearly 42 percent.”

“We think we are the only people in the world who live with threat, but we have to work with regional leaders who will work with us. Bibi is taking the country into unprecedented international isolation.”

Photograph by Adam Golfer

Ratio of money spent by Britons on prostitution to that spent on hairdressing:

“Shelby is waiting for something. He himself does not know what it is. When it comes he will either go back into the world from which he came, or sink out of sight in the morass of alcoholism or despair that has engulfed other vagrants.”